


I am your death cry

by comrade_valerie



Category: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Genre: Backstory, Iran, Vampires, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:27:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28080918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comrade_valerie/pseuds/comrade_valerie
Summary: The girl was made like this, not born.
Kudos: 1





	I am your death cry

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place immediately the events of the movie.

When they are out of Bad City, Arash stops the car. After driving for hours, the music he was playing has long since run out, leaving them to journey on in silence. 

They just passed a sign bearing the name of a different town, too fast to read. Even though there is nothing else around, they are officially Somewhere Else. Not Bad City. 

Arash thought that the car would break down as they attempted to cross city limits, that they would run out of fuel, that the town wouldn’t let them leave. He has never been superstitious before, but the events of the past few weeks make him wonder if there are things in the shadows of the world darker than just pimps and drug pushers.

The girl is silent as she has been for the whole ride. Most of her is hidden, only lit by the light reflecting from the headlights.

He says: “We’re pretty far out. Are you tired?”

The girl shakes her head.

“I need to rest for a couple of hours,” Arash says. She nods.

The air in the car is still, and the girl doesn’t know what she’s doing here. Arash is looking at her sideways. “I don’t even know your name,” he says. 

“Noor,” the girl replies, and she was, once. It is not a name she can properly call herself anymore. 

He leans across the spaces between their seats. She does not move away, and he’s kissing her. In his mouth is an insistent hunger, like the kind that drives her to feed, but softer. She wonders if he tastes the traces of blood in her mouth.

What now? The girl thinks, her eyes open, staring into the darkness behind Arash. Where are they headed? What will they do? His hands are on her shoulder, her back, and her skin is cold, like always. How is she going to keep herself fed if they are traveling together?

Arash puts his tongue in her mouth, clumsily- she thinks, he hasn’t done this before- and the girl flinches back immediately, because she worries that her fangs will pop out and he will realize what he is in the car with. Arash stops at once. “Sorry. I should have guessed...you wear the veil. We don’t have to do anything.” 

She does not wear the long black robe because she is religious- the girl is one of the things imams pray against- she wears it because it protects her skin from light in the day time, and because it grants her anonymity on the streets. When it flaps, she looks like an oversized bat. Considering the stereotype regarding her kind and those nocturnal animals, she finds this very funny.

But if Arash wants to think that she is a devout Muslim, she won’t correct him. 

He slides back into his seat, and so much time passes that the girl thinks he is asleep, but then he says, quietly: “Did you kill my father?”

A pause. Without looking at him, she replies, “I never knew your father.” 

He sleeps and the night passes. 

She wasn’t always...like this. They are born, not made. Noor was a person, once. A university student with high grades. She lived in Tehran, and she was a good girl, except she took the risk of walked home alone at night. She was walking back to her apartment, and a shape came out of the darkness and pinned her against the wall of an alley. At first she thought the man- it was a man, from what she saw from a flash of the streetlight- was going to rape her, but he fastened onto her neck, and she felt a sharp pain there before blacking out.

Some time later, she woke up in a dumpster. Noor did not understand what had happened to her. There were two incision marks on her neck, but she did not make the connection, and who would have? Not Noor, an atheist with no time for the supernatural. She climbed out of the garbage and walked back to her home. 

The attack felt her feeling as if she had been ill for a long time. Initially, she thought she was pregnant, because if she tried to eat, she vomited it immediately. It terrified her, but she was afraid to go to the hospital because of what they might tell her. 

Her apartment had no windows and for some reason, she did not need to turn her lights on. Noor had seen no one for a week, until her landlord came to the door asking for the rent. The man's blood smelled so alive, and she wanted it. Something inside her reacted, grabbing him with a strength she didn't recognize, pulling him forward and biting him. She drank, and broke his neck, which the one who made her was not kind enough to do. Then she ran until she reached the desert. 

Over a decade passed. The girl remained in the wasteland during the revolution of 1979. The hostage crisis unfolded without her knowledge. She told herself she wanted to die, but if she really wanted to, she wouldn’t have feasted on the blood of the snakes and spiders that crossed her path. Their venom is sharp and bitter in her mouth, but doesn’t harm her. She would have allowed the sun to burn her body into nothingness, instead of crawling into crevices during the day.

Starving, the girl eventually wandered to Bad City. No one comes to the outskirts of the town, and she wonders if the pile of desiccated bodies that she stacked by the factory will ever be found. Would anyone care? 

It was men that she killed there, all men. She tried to kill those that did not deserve to live, and in that place, there were many such people: the rapists, pimps, drug dealers. Their blood was laced with the various stimulants they took, which left her doubly intoxicated after feeding. She thinks of Atti, the prostitute. The girl killed the man who was attacking her. Men like him are more dangerous to the women of Bad City than she could ever be.

After she was bitten, she was no longer afraid of what women everywhere are afraid of- men. The girl walked home alone at night. 

She was stronger than them, and as she went along streets in places and at hours that Noor would have never gone, with the confidence that men across the world feel. The peace of being alone at nighttime, while gliding on her skateboard, never ceased to amaze her.

The girl took her victims’ valuables: earrings, watches, and rings. Gold teeth sometimes too, although they were harder to get out. Though she did not need money for anything: food, water, or heat were for the living- the girl took the jewelry for decoration. Taking baubles from the living made her feel better than a brutish animal predator. They litter every surface in the apartment she was squatting in, costume jewelry and fakes mixed with precious stones and gold.

The earrings from Arash, heavy on her healing earlobes, are the first she has ever worn, and they stick out against her dark veil.

In the morning, sun comes out, and the girl pulls the chador closer around her. The black and white cat is climbing all over her lap. They continue on, away.


End file.
